CURRENTS: RESTAURANTS; To Protect Their Projects, Young Architects Try DIY

By EVA HAGBERG

Published: March 10, 2005

Young architects working on low-budget projects live in constant fear of their designs being mangled by corner-cutting builders. But the brothers Paul and David Lewis (at right, left and right) and their partner, Marc Tsurumaki (center), of the downtown firm LTL, found ways to avoid this danger in the construction of their two new restaurants in New York -- Xing, a contemporary Chinese spot in Midtown (785 Ninth Avenue, at 52nd Street), and Tides, a simple seafood place and raw bar on the Lower East Side (102 Norfolk Street, at Delancey Street).

Xing's owner, Michael Lagudis, who shared his architects' concern, chose to hire himself -- and his newly formed construction company--to do the work.

''I gave these architects everything they wanted,'' Mr. Lagudis said, adding that his hands will ''take years to recover.'' As he spoke, the three partners inspected a curtain he had just installed and finger-dusted the restaurant's centerpiece -- a canopy made of more than 10,000 feet of mostly green translucent acrylic slats, top. The canopy, David Lewis explained, ''acts as a stitch'' in the restaurant, linking a slotted bamboo-walled front area with a gangsterish back room lined in plush red velvet panels, by way of a large and ethereal blue fish tank, above.

Contractors built much of Tides, around the corner from LTL's Essex Street offices, but the sculptural ceiling and booth tops, a topography of 120,000 bamboo skewers driven into acoustical foam (right), were painstakingly put together by the architects and their assistants. EVA HAGBERG